Connectionists: New publication from the INCF Infrastructure Committee

[INCF]

The INCF Infrastructure Committee’s “Recommendations for repositories and
science gateways from a neuroscience perspective”
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01334-1> has been published
today, May 16, as a Comment in Scientific Data
<https://www.nature.com/sdata/>.

The project, initiated by the INCF Infrastructure Committee, aimed to
develop an inclusive set of criteria that could apply to a wide and diverse
range of digital services, including repositories, science gateways, data,
and software.

“We set out to develop criteria that were specific to neuroscience, but we
realized during the process that our end result would be applicable to
other data-heavy disciplines as well”, says Malin Sandström, coordinator
for the Infrastructure Committee. “When you look at the problem closely, it
turns out that many of the criteria have to do with best practices for how
a service is run and governed, rather than with which types of data and
other content it contains”.

The work began in October 2020. A draft version
<https://www.incf.org/criteria-checklist> was presented to the community at
the INCF Assembly in April 2021, in a workshop
<https://f1000research.com/documents/10-1026> with representatives from
organizations engaged in similar projects, including FAIRSharing, FORCE11,
and the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR). A public first
version of the criteria checklist was made available on the INCF portal
<https://www.incf.org/criteria-checklist> in late 2021.

With these criteria, INCF wants to help neuroscience researchers and
students choose good services for their specific use cases and help service
providers make good and future-proof decisions for setup and operations.
Former Chair Wojtek Goscinski, now Chief Executive Officer at the
Australian National Imaging Facility, explains:

“Data repositories and scientific gateways are critical, but often
underappreciated, components in the scientific workflow. It’s important
that researchers can navigate the digital landscape to find the services
that they need and to understand which services are fit-for-purpose.
Likewise, repositories and gateways have increasing obligations to their
users”.

The recommendations published in the Comment are intended to guide users
through the reasoning and considerations that went into the criteria
development process.

Read more:
Workshop report <https://f1000research.com/documents/10-1026>
Public first version criteria <https://www.incf.org/criteria-checklist>
Blog post
<https://incf.org/blog/incf-infrastructure-committee-recommendations-published-scientific-data>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20220516/1fa1d86e/attachment.html>